Announcing apache-extras.org
The
Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) has had a profound influence on everything I’ve worked on over the
last decade, and a new partnership with them is a great opportunity for saying “thanks” and
giving back. Today we’re announcing the launch of
apache-extras.org. Much like our launch of
eclipselabs.org earlier this year, we’re creating
a separate instance of Project Hosting specifically for ASF-related projects to congregate
around.
Back in 2000,
when the
Subversion project was in its
nascent stages, we first few committers were all made members of the
APR (Apache Portable Runtime) project; Subversion
and Apache
HTTPD shared this common
portability layer. Over the following years, I was pulled ever closer to the workings of the
ASF -- attending Apachecon conventions and meeting members from other ASF projects. And
because the Subversion project started out with a significant number of developers from the
Apache community, its own processes came to mimic the same classic consensus-driven culture
that the ASF champions.
Years after that, Google Code’s
Project Hosting service was also started by
ASF members working at Google. So it’s not surprise that those of us who still work on the
product share the ASF’s core philosophy: that open source projects aren’t just buckets of
code, but are all about people. A codebase without a living, breathing community is a dead
project.
So what can we do, as a company, to support open source
communities? Providing hosting infrastructure certainly helps, but we can even go a step
further. Successful open source software projects are rarely islands of development; larger
projects tend to develop ecosystems of related but “unofficial” projects around them. It’s
sometimes hard to identify these sub-communities, and so we can help by bolstering their
presence: give them a clearer sense of identity and location by inviting them to live under a
common banner.
This is why we’re excited to launch
apache-extras.org today. By working under a
common logo and domain name, we hope these projects can gain more visibility and grow into
their own thriving community.
And to the ASF: a great big “thanks” for
doing what you do.
[If you already have a project on Google
Code and would like to migrate it to the apache-extras instance, you can fill out
this
request form.]
By Ben Collins-Sussman, Engineering Manager (and ASF
Member!)
